Obama Refused to Help Iranian Opposition in 2009, Says New Book

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President Barack Obama. Photo: Screenshot.

JNS.org – US President Barack Obama decided not to support the Iranian opposition during the 2009 elections to protect secret negotiations he was holding with Tehran on its nuclear program, a recently published book alleges.

Several sections of The Iran Wars by The Wall Street Journal‘s Jay Solomon were published by the Bloomberg news agency Wednesday, in which Solomon writes that Obama actively refrained from assisting the demonstrators. According to the book, he ignored advisers who told him to support the opposition in Iran, even ordering the CIA to sever ties with an opposition leader.

“The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money and in extreme cases even arms,” Solomon wrote. “But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”

Demonstrations broke out in Iran in June 2009, after then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of elections that many considered rigged. From the beginning, the White House downplayed the importance of the demonstrations, and when the president finally did speak about them, he refrained from mentioning election fraud.